To Read or Not To Read

My niece Gretchen is about to give birth to her first child. During her pregnancy, her husband Tony has been reading to their unborn baby. Currently, he’s working his way through Don Quixote.

In my family, this is considered normal.

Of all the things I’m thankful for, high on my list is that I was raised by readers. Since I was the eldest child and my father was faraway fighting a war, my mother read to me incessantly. Happily, I’m still being read to.

In the midst of her kindergarten year, Zoe called. When I answered the phone, I was greeted with an exuberant, “Grandma, I can read!”  Read she can and does. When I’m a guest in their house, I have the pleasure of Zoe reading to me every evening.

Of course, you can catch book passion any time in life. However, the sooner you get it, the more time you have to consume more titles.

Once caught, this fever doesn’t diminish. My sister Nancy, who has lived abroad her entire adult life, is relocating to Santa Barbara. She told me that the shipping company required that she count the books in her library.

“I discovered,” she said, with some amazement, “that I own 1,026 books.” Now I’m eager to do an inventory of my own since I have no idea how many books are in my library.

Since Nancy and I are both moving into new homes, finding the perfect spot for our books is a top priority. I keep thinking of Anna Quindlen’s observation, “I will be most happy if my children grow up to be the kind of people whose idea of decorating is to add more bookshelves.”

So while reading for pleasure is what often snares us to begin with, a desire to become our best selves often has us exploring new sections of the library and bookstore.

If you’re building a business, new titles and old can accelerate your success, connect you with ideas, resources and inspiration you’d never have encountered while walking down the street.

Here are five old favorites that are a pleasure to read and filled with useful insights for the Joyfully Jobless life:

Growing a Business by Paul Hawken

Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Small is the New Big by Seth Godin

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink

While some of these titles may be old friends already, I chose them because they all are worthy of more than one visit.

And if you aren’t a regular reader, make time every day to sample the creative thinkers, the life teachers, the pioneers who have wonderful things to teach us. If you don’t, you’ll be inflicting a needless handicap on yourself.

As the wise Jim Rohn used to say, “The only thing worse than not reading a book in the last 90 days, is not reading a book in the last 90 days and thinking it doesn’t matter. Skip a meal if you must, but don’t skip a book.”

IdeaStarter #4 What Scares You?

 

Hardly a day passes when I don’t hear from someone who is bored to tears with their job and longing to step out on their own, but claim that fear is keeping them stuck. Alas, they’re not telling the truth, either to me or themselves. Fear, after all, is that really useful emotion that warns us when danger is near. What’s so sad is that people often interpret as fear a different emotion: self-doubt. As long as they label that feeling as “fear” they continue to see it as a warning sign. On the other hand, if it’s actually a case of self-doubt that’s holding them back, that’s something they can overcome. That can be scary, too.

Then how do we move past this? We have to begin by refusing to keep nurturing our doubts. To paraphrase an old quote, “Doubts, like babies, grow larger with nursing.”

We also have to stop deceiving ourselves that we’ll act after our self-esteem is intact. That’s backwards. Our self-esteem grows because we take action.

When Garland Wright was artistic director of the Guthrie Theater, he challenged his staff by saying, “What we need now is an idea big enough to scare us.”  Do you see the brilliance of that?  How about letting a big, scary idea point you in the direction of your dreams?

$100 Hour: In Phil Laut’s wonderful little book, Money is My Friend, he offers this exercise for testing ideas. “Once you have an idea of what you can do to make your favorite money making idea a financial success, ask yourself whether you are willing to stick with it, no matter what it takes, until you receive your first $100 from it. If you are not willing to do this, then you certainly don’t yet have an idea that you like well wnough to succeed with…If you make a habit of only devoting yourself to ideas that you like so well you are willing to stick with them until you receive your first $100, you will never again feel like yu failed. After receiving your first $100, you can decide whether you want to continue with the idea—but you will be making the choice from the position of having succeeded.

Explore More: If you don’t own a copy of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, I’m going to keep nagging you until to add it to your library. If it’s already in your library, pick it up now, open it at random and read a page or two. Ah.

Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I prefer to see you living in better accomodations. ~ Hafiz